Ken Chen, executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, is a guest editor for The PEN Ten, PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week Ken talks with Dorothy Tse.

Dorothy Tse is an experimental writer whose work reimagines the cityscape of Hong Kong as mundane hallucination. Once a transnational hub for British colonial finance, now repossessed by an anti-Democratic China, Hong Kong for Tse is a space where identities are fluctuating and commodified. In Tse’s new book Snow and Shadow (translated by Nicky Harman)—from which you can read a story here—the violence of state capitalism expresses itself in stories where the characters chop off their limbs and exchange them for currency.

Last year, when the Umbrella Movement occupied the public spaces of Hong Kong to demand universal suffrage, Tse wrote a poem, combining revolutionary love and horror, called “Noise Reduction Machine,” which you can read in The Margins. She’ll be reading from these stories at AAWW on Thursday, April 2, with Betsy Fagin of the feminist poetry collective Belladonna, Cathy Park Hong, and Michael Leong.

When did being a writer begin to inform your sense of identity?

When writing became a way of erasing my identity, of putting on different faces, of speaking in foreign languages.

Whose work would you like to steal without attribution or consequences?

My three-year-old younger sister, if I had one. All her insane stories would be written in a secret, dirty notebook. The words would be unreadable and so each time I would need her to tell me the story in person, with gestures and laughs. It would always contradict the previous story. She could tell thousands of different stories out of that magical little piece of work.

Where is your favorite place to write?

A cool and slightly inclined surface with the smell of a bigger universe.

Have you ever been arrested? Care to discuss?

When we were playing hide and seek. We imitated the human world when we thought we were still outside of it. We all know the arbitrary nature of being “policeman” or “thief”. But it is always better to be a thief because only they get to escape. The policeman is arrested from the very beginning.

Obsessions are influences—what are yours?

To escape.

What’s the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words?

Every word becomes dangerous when words fall into a wave of social movements.

What is the responsibility of the writer?

To tell the lie behind all lies.

While the notion of the public intellectual has fallen out of fashion, do you believe writers have a collective purpose?

I believe that collectivity and individuality are both illusions. Even when we are fighting in a battle against the same enemy, everyone has their own desires. Yet your desires do not originate from yourself.

What book would you send to the leader of a government that imprisons writers?

A storybook about our human species turning into air dolls. They would be so light, with shiny, smiling faces. When the dictator wants to kill them, he could just use a small pin to poke them.

Where is the line between observation and surveillance?

Sometimes fear can turn observation into surveillance.

]]>http://aaww.org/the-pen-ten-with-dorothy-tse/feed/0Blessed Bodieshttp://aaww.org/blessed-bodies-dorothy-tse/
http://aaww.org/blessed-bodies-dorothy-tse/#commentsMon, 30 Mar 2015 14:37:59 +0000http://aaww.org/?p=19385"The mother, seeing her one-armed son standing in the doorway, was not surprised. It was as she had foreseen."]]>

Translated by Nicky Harman, “Blessed Bodies” is from Dorothy Tse’s new collection of short stories, Snow and Shadow (Muse, East Slope Publishing Limited). It is published here in collaboration with PEN America.

Y-land had no marriage system but was famous for its prosperous sex industry. Even bartering was allowed: when the male clients could not afford to pay, they could obtain sexual services by trading their body parts. At the moment of sexual arousal, a man would stand in the doorway, peeping into a dim room where a woman reclined on the bed. Once she adopted the desired position, he no longer cared about his arms or legs. But with the ebbing of arousal, the man would open his eyes to see what had once been his limb — first amputated, then frozen, bottled, and removed. Only then would he be astonished at the impulsive decision he had made.

Amputees could be seen all over Y-land, hobbling heroically along the city streets. The limbs that had once belonged to them were stored in special depots. There, glass bottles of all sizes were arrayed on rusty iron shelves in packed rows. The refracted light made the limbs, floating in preserving fluid, appear grossly deformed. Soon they would be loaded onto ships and sold to the developed countries that bordered Y-land.

At times of peak arousal, the impoverished men of Y-land milled around in the streets, gazing up at the dead leaves that floated from the trees or down at their own big feet. In the sunshine, they were accompanied by anxious shadows that crept along behind them, looming over the bodies to which they were attached.

•••

In October, the girl and her brother arrived in Y-land by boat. The streets were full of people selling creamlettes. They ladledgolden batter onto sizzling hot-plates, where it spread out and set in perfect disks that seemed to hint at a blessed life.

“You’ll lose your body here,” said her brother as he bought her a creamlette.

The cream oozed out, over the thin greaseproof paper and onto her brother’s hand—like happiness brimming over. But the fragrant smell of the creamlette just made her want to vomit.

A doctor, sitting across the rectangular white table from them, reassured her, “Being sick has nothing to do with pregnancy. You’re only feeling seasick because you’ve imagined your room as a boat.”

They took the girl and her brother up to the top floor of an old building. It was just as she had imagined it, so dark green it seemed to have moldered to the point of disintegrating.

In this gloomy apartment there were two rooms, each with gray walls and an over-sized bed. It took the girl some time to locate the tiny window, high up on the wall and pasted shut with newspaper that had yellowed with age. She stood on tiptoe on the bed, pushed the window open, and saw the mist from the street rippling towards her.

The girl really did believe from the start that this building was a boat. The first time she stepped on the floor, it felt insubstantial. The sound of waves reached her from outside the window, and the floor seeped water, so that the girl, alone with the few sticks of furniture, became frantic at the thought of going moldy.

In the middle of the night, the girl always felt terrified that the boat was spinning on the crest of a wave. The floor seemed to be bucking and rearing, and she would stagger into the other room, crawl into her brother’s bed, and sleep with him. When she woke up the next morning, she would rush to the window and look out, to reassure herself that she had not been carried off to another unknown place.

The girl liked the narrow street outside the building. Sometimes, the street was enlivened by men passing by, brandishing knives or glass jars, especially when their rich red blood dyed the asphalt and the trash heaped on it. Her eye was often caught by a bloodstained plastic bag fluttering in the breeze.

It did not take her brother long to discover that she had brought in sacks filled with stones. These she placed individually in each corner. But nothing stopped her feeling queasy, and she was forced to take the seasick pills the doctor had prescribed.

In November, the girl placed her feet side by side, joining her big toes together. It was cold, as cold as the yellow glass on the opposite side of the street. Behind the glass, she could see the face of a young man, tilted slightly upwards. The young man’s gaze was climbing right into her window. The face appeared so often that she came to regard it as part of the street scene.

•••

Her brother was surprised when she said she wanted to go outside and put up leaflets to sell herself.

She had head lice. He made her sit on a stool and he carefully separated the strands of her hair, combing out the gray-black eggs with a fine-toothed comb so that they plopped onto a metal tray. He had to crack the really stubborn ones between his fingernails before he could pull them out.

“They said you could wait six months,” said her brother, dousing her head with kerosene and wrapping it in a towel. There was a powerful stink in the air.

The girl paid no attention. She just smiled. Her face was covered in dimples, so that when she smiled, it always looked as if she was crying.

The girl told them she wanted a huge mirror so that she could see her whole body. It should be smooth and shimmering and reflect her in the minutest detail. When she washed her hair, she would sit in front of the mirror and coil it up. Then she would strip naked and look at her budding figure. She was so skinny that her bone structure was clearly visible under the skin. Under her right breast, there was one abnormally sunken rib.

“What do you think?”

Her brother was standing by her bed, looking out the window at the scenery. “Too pale, too thin.”

“How about these?” asked the girl, indicating the slight protuberances of her breasts.

“Them too.”

But the girl realized her brother was not looking at her properly so, paying no attention to what he thought, she dressed again, grabbed a sheaf of leaflets, and ran downstairs. All down the stairwell, the walls were completely covered with black leaflets, and there were more in the noodle shop at the bottom of the stairs. The people slurping their noodles and looking through the window, at a world made dark by the leaflets, thought it was the end of the world. No matter, the sorrow they felt sharpened their appetites and the hot noodlesmade them a little tipsy. The steam from their bowls obscured their coarse features and, in their excitement, men and women began to play footsie under the tables.

The young man came over to the girl. He was dressed in a baggy black sweater, and his hair was cropped short. The girl had not realized until then just how pallid he was, almost like someone in a black-and-white photograph. He tore down one of her leaflets, and a single patch of red appeared on each pale cheek. It was, thought the girl, as rich a color as the bloodied plastic bags that she had seen in the street.

•••

The mother, seeing her one-armed son standing in the doorway, was not surprised. It was as she had foreseen. The night sky was not very dark. There was a row of four streetlamps, but only one of them emitted a flickering light, and her son stood under it in his black sweater. His empty left sleeve dangled limply, showing that now he was a man. He had grown tall and slender, and looked as desolate as an empty road.

His amputation did not worry his mother. All the men in Y-land learned to do everything one-handed from boyhood, even buttoning their coats with both feet, as well as all sorts of other minor tasks. What did worry her was the way he lay in bed biting his fingernails and smiling a little smile. He just looked too blessed. It seemed that he didn’t regret the loss of an arm at all.

Silently, in a funereal mood, his mother got his dinner ready. Her son carried on lying on the bed: his head to one side, his eyes shut, day after day, in the same position. His mother was mostly puzzled by this, although sometimes the scene filled her with an almost religious fervor.

Hordes of ants began to gather at his bedside, as if on a pilgrimage. His mother took a broom and, as she swept, heaps of Coca-Cola cans clattered out from under the bed. She remembered how, years before, he used to lie in bed, obsessed by books on witchcraft. He ate nothing as he read; he just drank Coke. He kept this up for four years. After his mother washed the old Coke cans, she covered the walls of the house with them, and used them to erect a fence outside the house too. The dazzling red of the cans filled her with a near certainty that he would risk his life for his obsession.

Once when she was sure that her son was asleep, she located the ten cans in the Coke wall that she had marked and stuffed with twenty-dollar bills, and skillfully extracted them. After she checked to make sure that none of the money was missing, she hesitated for a very long time, thinking about whether to use the money to fulfill her son’s desires, but finally decided against it. Before putting the cans back in place, she took a roll of bills from one of them and put it under the seventh floorboard from the door, the one right next to the wall.

The money would be enough to give her son a decent funeral, she thought to herself.

•••

The young man was dreaming of a vast ocean. At first it was not an ocean, but a huge bed. The naked girl was at one end of the bed, sitting cross-legged. Above her knees, he could see a pair of flat breasts that looked like oversized eyes. But the eyes were not looking at him. They gazed at a boat far, far in the distance.

The girl told him that before he came along, she often felt she was being bowled over and over in the sea, all alone, being blown by the wind to a place she did not recognize. So every time she got out of bed, she thought she had landed on a strange, new shore.

“After you came along, I felt that we were trying madly to reach the shore together, but just as we were almost there, you would turn and leave me.”

The girl’s words hurt the young man. He began to weep, his tears salty like seawater. His sorrow turned blue and shrouded the whole dream. This persuaded him that the ocean was huge.

When the young man woke up, he told his dream to a man in a black jacket who happened to be passing by outside the front door. “This must be what they call love, mustn’t it?” the man responded in a low voice.

He did not know the man, but he ended up inviting him into the house. As a result, the man became his mother’s client, and so lost an eye.

•••

The girl had few visitors, and those that did come hardly ever came back for another visit. The girl had nothing to do. She stood on the bed with her brother, looking out the tiny window into the narrow alley outside. Occasionally there were passersby, and the girl made her brother guess whether they would come upstairs.

By now the weather was getting warmer; people were wearing clothes that were too tight and made them puff and pant. Two men stood down below, looking up at the girl’s window. They stood there a long time.

“They won’t come,” her brother said, as he always did.

The girl was indignant. She stuck her head out of the window and waved energetically, but the men below lowered their heads and hurried away.

Her brother could not help smiling.

He had not told the girl how he detested her shutting the apartment door and making him wait outside. When that happened, he fidgeted anxiously, then got out his pen and wrote random hieroglyphics all over the gray wall. On and on he wrote, until his hand and arm ached.

When the visitor finally left, the girl liked to go up to the wall, connect the hieroglyphics, and make them into a song. She would sing out hoarsely: hua-hua-you-dad-tu-tu…la-la… sha-bu-dong-me-he-ya…

She made the tune sound quite festive, and could keep it up until evening. Her brother particularly disliked having visitors in the evening because, if no one came, the girl would put her arms around his neck, bury her head in his armpit, and fall fast asleep. When she woke up again, she would tell him all the dreams she’d had.

Just at that moment, someone else came into view down in the street. It was the young man, now one-eyed, walking with the aid of a stick, tapping his way along with a cheerful rhythm. Of all the visitors, her brother disliked the young man most, because when he and the girl shut the door on him it always felt like a century before they opened it up again.

Y-land folk all knew that the young man had already lost an arm and a leg and an eye for the girl. “You should hang onto your hand,” the girl told him, “to stroke my face, my thigh, and my ribs… What else can you give them?”

“It’s my liver this time,” said the young man, with a slight smile, his pale face flushing once more.

The girl was reassured and smiled. Everyone said that when the girl smiled, it always looked as if she was crying.

•••

The girl dreamed she was sitting in a boat, sailing to a small island. But it was too dark on the island, and the girl could not be sure that was what it was.

Then she saw a light, perhaps from a streetlamp in the center of the island. She felt her way towards the source of the light, only to find that it was not a streetlamp but the young man standing there. By now he had lost both arms, and was left with just one leg to hold his body upright. It was his right eye that was emitting the light. She had not realized it was so bright. It was a pity that the eye was so high up; she could not reach it, even on tiptoe. Otherwise, she could have dug it out and patrolled the island, holding it in her cupped hands. The young man’s remaining leg had sunk deep in the ground by now and the girl sat down, leaning against his leg, until the light disappeared.

When she woke up, she told the dream to her brother. He said nothing, just gently wiped the sweat from her body. His hand slid from her flat chest, down over the sunken rib. Then it stopped, and he kissed her.

•••

A light spread out in all directions, and it was possible to make out things that were represented by a variety of colors. The pink seemed to be dust, the green was mold, the violet was a puff of hypnotic powder, and the yellow was aged light. Finally, everything faded from view.

Such was the scene the young man saw before he lost his second eye. When everything had gone pitch-black, and the blackness had no trace of color left in it, he discovered he was in terrible pain. He begged to be taken home. After all, he was an old customer.

They told him they were putting him into a wooden cart, but it felt to him like he was being tossed head over heels like a fish in a huge frying pan, until every one of his still-unhealed wounds burst open. He could not tell whether what he was feeling was scorching heat or pain.

They laughed at him. “That’s because Y-land’s roads are full of potholes,” they said, “and have wrecked cars, dead fish, and bottles of lubricating oil piled up on them.”

As they went along, they took turns describing the scenery to the young man so he could tell them the way. There was an abortion clinic on the corner, they said, the one run by the woman doctor, Dr. Tang, with the gleaming white skin and great fat fingers. There was a stall selling placenta next door to the clinic, but most of the placenta was fake, just something made from gelatin. He said he did not remember the clinic or the shop. He probably had not come this way before.

“Then you can’t have been inside Y-land’s first cinema, right? They show all sorts of porn films there.”

This made them all feel sorry for the newly blind young man. By this time, they had given up asking him how to get back to his home, and were just taking him wherever they felt like, singing at the top of their voices: hua-hua-you-dad-tu-tu…la- la…sha-bu-dong-me-he-ya…

Meanwhile, the young man’s mother had gotten his dinner ready and had been sitting waiting for him for a long time. Her eyelids felt so heavy, and even though she heard the distant sound of singing, her head dropped on the table and she fell fast asleep.

The young man did not know what time it was—probably morning, to judge by the slight warmth of the sun that fell on his face. Now he had a new way to experience the sun.

“It’s so dark,” he said.

•••

The girl did not know if the young man ever visited again, because soon afterwards, she left Y-land.

On her brother’s bed, she discovered a wad of cash. “They want you to get rid of the child,” said her brother.

But his mouth was full of toothpaste and the girl could not understand what he was saying.

When he finished brushing his teeth and went back into the room to find her, the girl was gone, wandering aimlessly and alone through the dawn streets. On the pavement, there was a one-eyed old man making stuffed creamlettes with golden-yellow cream, too much of it. The girl bought one. It was the first time she had tasted one of these golden creamlettes. Its sweetness startled her, as did the fact that she liked it very much.

The street cleaner was washing down the pavement with detergent. The girl sat on a bench, nibbling carefully at the creamlette until it was all gone. By the time she had finished, bubbles were rising up from the street into the air, sailing towards some nearby railings in the morning sunlight, and then bursting, perhaps because the sun was too bright. Beyond the railings, countless silent boats were moored.

The girl finally bought herself a boat ticket to an unknown destination. When she stepped on deck, it felt curiously stable. She would not have known they were moving but for the ship’s horn. After she got pregnant, she did not vomit anymore. Her body felt heavier and heavier, and even standing on deck she did not feel like she was floating.

It was night and the boat passengers had gone to sleep. The girl discovered the cabin was full of doors, all with bolts. She tried to open them and realized they were not real bolts at all. There was nothing behind most of the doors, just an enormous hold which seemed bigger even than the entire boat. Behind one, however, was a room filled with bottles of yellow liquid. Each bottle was marked with a time and date. The largest bottles were filled with very long legs; the smallest held eyeballs. The girl crouched down and found a bottle labeled “2002-7-28 19:30,” with a small, bright eyeball in it. She picked it up and put it in her pocket. Once, she remembered, this eye had been firmly embedded in the young man’s face.

She realized that there was one woman on the boat who was not asleep. The woman’s son had died a week before. The woman had sold as many of her son’s body parts as she could, so she did not have to pay a cent for the funeral. The mother, old and faded-looking, had decided to leave Y-land after it was over. Before she left, she strung together some of the Coke cans she had stored in her son’s room and attached them to her only long skirt. Now she was on the boat, and the clanking of the cans, with their glittering red color, was her way of grieving for her son.

From comics to technology, Asian Americans play crucial roles in many industries, even if they are unseen and underrepresented at times. Aamer Rahman talks about comedy and race, while Rodney Fuentebella explores being an illustrator at Marvel. Roadblocks facing older immigrants, tackling unwelcoming environments and more in the Margins’ weekly roundup.

This week’s roundup was compiled by Alex Wen, an engineer-turned-writer interning at the AAWW. He still wants to solve the world’s puzzles, just with a pen instead of a wrench.

]]>http://aaww.org/margins-link-roundup-6/feed/0Eugenia Leigh: Three Poemshttp://aaww.org/eugenia-leigh-three-poems/
http://aaww.org/eugenia-leigh-three-poems/#commentsTue, 24 Mar 2015 16:13:25 +0000http://aaww.org/?p=19341My mother left my father more than once. A favorite / family tradition observed when I was four. / Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Leaving is easier / the second time.]]>

This week we bring you three poems from Eugenia Leigh’s recently published debut poetry collection, Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, which Eduardo C. Corral calls “brutal and brilliant.” Eugenia’s poems render me breathless, not only with her bold and unflinching confrontation with God and violence, but also with her capacity for love. Her poems teach us that it is okay to keep questioning, and that one can soar above a history of trauma by finding forgiveness for others as well as oneself. Don’t miss the trailer for the book on her website.

—Emily Yoon

MONSTERS

The first time I imagined harming a man,
I was twelve. I imagined that cop
quivering in my fists.

When our dad ran from California—first on foot,
then by bus—did he drag us out?
Or did my sister and I chase him? He disguised us
as boys. We left our mom
messages from payphones. Survived on fries.
And the morning he was arrested
outside that Wisconsin hotel, I stitched into my eyelids

that image of him clinched in handcuffs, mouthing
assurance from the back of that howling car.

Nine years later, at Incheon International Airport,I don’t recognize him, cloaked in monstrous welts.
How does he know to run to me,
older than Mom was when I was born?

SEX AND HORSERADISH

My mother left my father more than once. A favorite
family tradition observed when I was four.
Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Leaving is easier

the second time. Like sex. Distance is an acquired
taste. Horseradish. When I first touched
a boy, I lusted for that stench

of begging. I would trap the boy in his car. Demand
he drive to the airport and park. He would reach
between my jeans. I would cry. Beg.

For no reason. Then he’d also beg and I’d let him
drive back to his large house. Let him
see his married parents again.

I left that boy. Then left the next one. Then left the next
and the next and when one tried to leave me, I tied
that one to my neck. He stayed for years

until I left him, too. Flew away,
really—his body, hanging
from my body.

TESTAMENT

A small woman lives in a flowerpot in my closet.
She hates light. Brandishes her fistswhen she speaks. Not speaks—

mocks. She asks about my parents: tell me a tragedy.
I’ve practiced that tragedy.
But this is the truth:

I never feared him. I feared her—her radiance, her hymns.

My fear being resistance to the impossible.
The impossible, a woman who endured.

He never said one kind word to her.
My father, I mean. To my mother, I mean.

Where did she gather those You are beautifuls
for my sisters and me? How did she never empty of warmth?

The small woman in the flowerpot loathes
my mother’s clean, clean bones.

She once dared me to spit in my mother’s face.(She didn’t spit back.)

When I was fifteen, my mother found me
in a bookstore with a boy pressed against my body—his muscles,

his jaw. I let him mark me.After years of raking her bruisesaway from her daughters, that was the only nightmy mother let me see her cry.

When God passed out mothers to all the beastly children
and wives to all the beasts,
how did he misplace my mother in that wrong pile?

And yet, her devastating joy. That rosy voice
insisting, insisting God is good.

“Monsters,” “Sex and Horseradish,” and “Testament” by Eugenia Leigh from Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (c) 2014. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.

]]>http://aaww.org/eugenia-leigh-three-poems/feed/0The Lark Essayshttp://aaww.org/the-lark-essays/
http://aaww.org/the-lark-essays/#commentsMon, 23 Mar 2015 20:10:35 +0000http://aaww.org/?p=19289Bushra Rehman’s “Two Truths and a Lie” writing workshop was held up at gunpoint last fall. Three writers tell the story of what happened and join a conversation about gentrification and police violence in NYC.]]>

On a Thursday evening last November, Bushra Rehman’s “Two Truths and a Lie” autobiographical fiction workshop was held up at gunpoint in Lark Cafe, a coffee shop in Brooklyn. Bushra and her students were forced to give up their laptops, losing years’ worth of writing, and in some cases entire unpublished manuscripts. In the days that followed, the accounts of the robbery that were published in the mainstream media left Bushra and her students deeply frustrated. Not only had their experience been misrepresented, but it was being used as a way to justify increased policing and a ramping up of NYC’s stop-and-frisk policy in the neighborhood. As Bushra writes in the introduction to a series of pieces she and two students from the class, Soniya Munshi and Nina Sharma, published last week in Teachers and Writers Magazine:

My students and I had a choice. We could allow our experience of that night to be misused or we could create and share our own narratives. As teachers in NYC, we have seen young boys of color suspended as early as middle school, a few of many affected by the school-to-prison pipeline. We have witnessed the effects of Stop-and-Frisk on students’ abilities to focus in class. We’ve felt the build-up of rage in the eyes of the public at the list of names as long as generations of young black men killed with no justice served. For many of our students, both high school and undergraduate, Stop-and-Frisk, police brutality, and lack of justice were not issues in the news, they were personal events and obstacles in their lives.

In the weeks that followed, the workshop convened in living rooms across the city and at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Bushra and her students began reflecting on the robbery and wrestled with a more difficult question: “Why this young man would need to walk into my classroom with a gun.”

Bushra, Soniya, and Nina are all teachers, and their deeply moving essays are also reflections about what role the classroom has in furthering conversations about race and the criminal justice system. Nina writes of her first year teaching an undergraduate composition class, and the way Bushra’s workshop that fall contrasted with her experience talking to students who, she notes, “took deeply racist positions on social privilege, their guiding arguments being along the lines of: ‘for things to get better, people need to not make such a ‘big deal’ of things.’” Describing the atmosphere of Bushra’s workshop, she writes:

It’s laughter from the edges that I believe we share in common: immigrants, children of immigrants, and marginalized people. It’s our collective inheritance, the laughter that keeps us from punching, the laughter that keeps us from crying. It’s what emerges on the pages.

Soniya, a professor of sociology and Asian American history at CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College, had been leading class discussions about gentrification in the city with her students, many of whom are working class and of color, when she told them about the robbery. “What I didn’t expect in that first week after the robbery was the role that my students would play in my healing process,” she writes. “I didn’t think of our classroom as a space that could, or should, nourish me in a time of vulnerability.” She continues:

My students expected me to feel angry with the person who robbed us. I didn’t. I hadn’t even spent much time thinking about him, but they were curious to know about this person. What led to his decision to rob us that night? Why did he rob our group and not the customers on the other side of the café? Did he feel bad afterwards? All we could do was speculate. Being able to imagine different possibilities without the need to come up with answers felt remarkably soothing.

Immediately after the robbery, students from Bushra’s class had tracked their stolen laptops to a different neighborhood altogether. But the police officers who arrived on the scene insisted on searching in the immediate vicinity of the cafe, stopping and frisking young black men on the streets. Bushra writes:

[T]he police rushed two students out, saying, “We have someone to ID. Hurry, hurry.” They were yelling, rushing, acting urgent. I wondered how they had someone to ID when the man had worn a mask and we had told them we couldn’t ID anyone.

There were tears in my students’ eyes when they returned. They had sat in the police car as the police pulled over a young black man and his friend while they were walking down the street, stopped them, and frisked them. These students had often been on the other side with boyfriends and friends—they shrank back into the police car, horrified.

One of Soniya’s students asked her if the robbery had changed the way she saw the world. “It was a good question,” she writes. “After some thought, I said that nothing had really changed, but the robbery taught me many things, such as the beautiful ways that people can hold each other in a crisis, as our writers’ group did that night. And, I left the robbery with a deeper responsibility to be active in dialogues about safety and policing in Jackson Heights, Queens, a gentrifying neighborhood where I was born and currently live. It felt good to say that commitment out loud.”

Read all three essays online in the latest issue of Teachers and Writers Magazine:

Food plays a central role in all of our lives. Explore the history of Americanized Chinese food, the struggles of bringing Asian food to school lunch tables, and PR-disaster names and campaigns by restaurants and cafes. How did nightclub entertainers pave the way for Asian Americans in showbiz? What’s the cultural weight behind expat? All that and more in the Margins‘ weekly roundup.

For this week’s Poetry Tuesday we bring you two poems by Hoa Nguyen that speak with awe and melancholy. We are with her as she watches the land strip of winter and remind us of the passing of time. It seems as if the speaker is in reverie; still, she holds us close, asking us to search for what is missing, and to remember it with her.

THREAD CORD

Slipping over flowers
to the dead place
flame headYou make me salt again

I am comfortable with the couch
and a rather perfect Yule tree
with various red birds and glass baubles
plus “3rd-world”-made
lace snowflakes (crocheted)

Feeling generous? Help fund a Sikh superhero comic and a new children’s book. Short on cash? Maybe it’s time to head back to school—that is, boba school. Or pick up some inspiration by checking out the story of how Snapchat’s co-founders turned a fad into a social media tour de force. If technology isn’t your thing, there’s also a profile of Rhea Suh, the president of one of the most influential environmental organizations in the nation. This is the Margins‘ weekly roundup.

This week’s roundup was compiled by Alex Wen, an engineer-turned-writer interning at the AAWW. He still wants to solve the world’s puzzles, just with a pen instead of a wrench.

]]>http://aaww.org/margins-link-roundup-4/feed/0The Limits of Diversityhttp://aaww.org/limits-diversity/
http://aaww.org/limits-diversity/#commentsThu, 12 Mar 2015 13:00:25 +0000http://aaww.org/?p=18976How the feel-good politics of multiculturalism have blinded the literary world to the roots of racial inequality]]>

Last November, while Ferguson, Missouri, reeled from clashes between the public and the police, the city’s Municipal Public Library stayed open. As residents waited tensely for a grand jury to decide whether to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the murder of teenager Michael Brown, businesses and schools alike shuttered their doors in anticipation of unrest. Yet, the library tweeted, “We will stay open to serve people of #Ferguson as long as safe for patrons & staff, up to 8p. Love each other.”

Within hours, the message had spread, generating thousands of donations and messages of public support from individuals, including celebrities like Neil Gaiman and Rachel Maddow. Amidst the pain and seething fury of a city cleaved through by racial injustice, the humble presence of books and their caretakers seemed to provide a small measure of comfort and a sense of budding hope.

If 2014 was a year of political and civic turbulence, it also seemed one of modest strides in the world of books. After the high-profile literary festival BookCon failed to include a single writer of color in its lineup, a group of authors, publishers, and readers renewed efforts to demand greater diversity in literature. A campaign that began as a Twitter hashtag, #WeNeedDiverseBooks, quickly transformed into a sprightly, volunteer-run nonprofit dedicated to examining the perpetually prickly subject of representation for marginalized groups in literature, particularly in young adult lit. The initiative was covered in outlets ranging from the Los Angeles Times to NPR, and when We Need Diverse Books released a crowdfunding request in late October, they quickly met their initial goal of $100,000.

A message from inside the Ferguson Municipal Public Library on the day a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for shooting and killing unarmed teenager Michael Brown. (Photo: Scott Bonner)

At a time when protests against police violence have directed national attention to the enduring racism experienced by black communities, the role that art and culture play in shaping racial attitudes has also come up for discussion. According to author S.E. Sinkhorn, a spokesperson for We Need Diverse Books, “[S]o many people of diverse backgrounds grew up without ever seeing themselves in books, which has the effect of making them feel invisible and alone. Many internalize negative ideas about themselves, and it’s crucial to make sure children see reflections of themselves in their books from early on.” To combat this dearth of diverse perspectives in children’s literature, the organization plans to send authors of color to schools to speak to students, fund internships in the publishing industry for disadvantaged individuals, increase the number of books by “non-majority authors” in school libraries, and monetarily support new authors through grants and awards. Most recently, the group announced a short story contest for emerging writers from “diverse experiences, including (but not limited to) LGBTQIA, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities, and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities.” The contest promised to the winner $1,000 and the inclusion of the winning submission in a WNDB anthology to be published by Crown Books.

The group’s focus on the representation of people of color in literature situates We Need Diverse Books in a long and ongoing push for multicultural curricula in primary schools. A movement that grew out of the post-Civil Rights battles for ethnic studies at universities, multicultural education germinated in the 1980s and included the introduction of topics such as Jewish and black history into public schools.

In the decades that followed, a number of psychologists and educators attempted to analyze whether multicultural education could close the persistent achievement gap between white and black students. Several ran studies that showed that exposure to multicultural literature indeed had positive effects on the self-esteem and academic performance of children of color. In one of these influential trials, researchers Mary Oldham Grice and Courtney Vaughn found that a group of black third graders who had been labeled “slow learners” responded positively to books about black families and were able to recall accurately storylines and offer commentary on the texts, suggesting that their academic impediments could be remedied by the increased use of multicultural materials.

The expansive research on the benefits of multiculturalism eventually encouraged several state legislatures to mandate multicultural education in public schools. Florida, for example, began requiring public schools to teach the history of the Holocaust in the early 90s. Gradually that requirement was expanded to include African American, Hispanic, and women’s history.

Students protest at Stanford University for more faculty of color and ethnic studies. May 15, 1989. (Photo: Chris Eisenberg. Courtesy The Stanford Daily)

Yet, it wasn’t only the presence of Black History Month lessons and multicultural books that made a difference for children of color. In 1995, Meei-ling Liaw conducted an experiment similar to the Grice and Vaughn study with Chinese American children, recording their responses to books about Chinese characters. She found that children’s opinions on the texts varied substantially. Many were critical of the books’ portrayals of Chinese culture. (As Liaw cautioned, “Multicultural children’s literature does not necessarily reflect the true images of minority culture.”) Her study concluded, “Chinese children’s responses to Chinese children’s books are diversified, which corroborates the reader response theory that a single, authoritative interpretation of a text does not exist but that a range of interpretations are possible.” A 2001 report by Kira Pirofski unsurprisingly further confirmed that simply introducing portrayals of marginalized groups had no benefit for those groups unless said depictions were felt by readers to be “culturally authentic.”

Now, more than twenty years later, the partially-realized project of multicultural education is what new measures like We Need Diverse Books have inherited and must contend with. Looking back, the corporate and educational diversity efforts of the 90s, which form the backbone of many progressive programs today, can feel vaguely alien, like happening upon an old yearbook photo in which one sports a dated haircut. The feel-good version of multiculturalism that reigned during the 90s produced a litany of pop culture artifacts like “ethnic” dolls cast in darker plastics from the same molds as their white counterparts, fictional multiracial Earth-saving gangs on TV (Power Rangers, Captain Planet’s Planeteers), and a set of Crayola markers that came in “skin” tones ranging from neon peach to a vivid chocolate-cherry. As an elementary schooler during the 1990s, I recalled teachers pressing into our hands a particularly lackluster book called We Are All Alike, We Are All Different, which stated the obvious—that different types of people existed in the world—but never got around to explaining why that mattered.

In his new book, Who We Be, cultural critic Jeff Chang describes this explosion of “diversity” merchandise as the era of “multiculturalism-as-consumer lifestyle.” The push for multiculturalism in the arts began in the late 1970s as a challenge to the exclusion of artists of color from artistic canons and institutions. Artists inspired by the militancy of freedom fighters like Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh brought the struggle for self-determination to the cultural realm, building an anti-assimilationist movement that foregrounded racial identity and criticized the overwhelmingly white and male gatekeepers of the art world.

First published in 1991, We Are All Alike… We Are All Different stated the obvious—that different types of people existed in the world—but never got around to explaining why that mattered.

By the 90s, entrepreneurs had realized that this fight for racial representation in the arts could be craftily co-opted as an opportunity to tap blooming “ethnic markets.” The resulting proliferation of race-targeted consumer goods, multiracial casts on TV and in movies, and programs adding multicultural materials to public school curricula produced the illusion of a society trending toward egalitarianism even as the Clinton administration was implementing savage welfare cuts that yanked the safety net from under millions of low-income black and Latino families.

This strange paradox of diversity flourishing at a time of continued (and often deepening) inequality for people of color in the US forms the underlying theme of Chang’s book, which unspools a series of cultural vignettes in order to generate a historical account of the complicated racial order today. Though the multiculturalists’ demands for increased representation of marginalized groups in arts and literature had been necessary, few significant material gains for people of color had resulted solely from this movement. “The state had hardly given way to a vast multicultural uprising,” Chang explains. “It had given way to capitalism furiously reorganizing itself for a global, browning world.”

* * *

Few would object to the claim that diversity in literature benefits students of color. However, measuring its impact on white students has proven trickier. The idea that mere exposure to other cultures helps foster open-mindedness underlies the We Need Diverse Books campaign and admittedly feels intuitive: “Books are more than mirrors—they’re also windows,” states author Matt de la Peña in a promotional video for the group. “I’ve always believed that reading is the ultimate form of empathy. It’s important to read about people who aren’t like us. It’s only then that we’ll have a full understanding of the world around us.”

A submission for the #WeNeedDiverseBooks Tumblr campaign, which lets readers share how not having enough diversity in the book they read affects their lives.

This sentiment was echoed in late November by WNDB board member and Brown Girl Dreaming author Jacqueline Woodson, who wrote eloquently in the New York Times, “This mission is what’s been passed down to me—to write stories that have been historically absent in this country’s body of literature, to create mirrors for the people who so rarely see themselves inside contemporary fiction, and windows for those who think we are no more than the stereotypes they’re so afraid of.” The unfortunate occasion for her remarks was the National Book Awards ceremony two weeks prior, where Lemony Snicket author Daniel Handler had cracked a crude racial joke in reference to Woodson while presenting her with an award.

Indeed, moments of racial insensitivity such as Handler’s abound in the book publishing industry, which a recent survey by Publishers Weekly found to be nearly 90 percent white. But the absence of empathy is only one effect of the ugly legacy of racism, not its root cause. As the political scientist Adolph Reed has observed, our tendency to view distance or lack of understanding between different racial groups as the crux of racism “is a direct outgrowth of two generations of mainstream race relations scholarship that frames discussion of racial stratification in individualist and attitudinal terms—driven by a language of sensitivity and tolerance—rather than in systemic terms of structured inequality.”

While in one sense the propensity in mainstream discourse to describe racial conflict with words like “tolerance” and “hate”—rather than “power” or “oppression”—has made it possible for greater numbers of people to conceive of how racism affects individuals on a psychological level, a more unsettling consequence of this turn has been that diversity has largely replaced equality as the ultimate goal for many educational and workplace settings, including the book publishing world.

The WNDB campaign has shone a spotlight on the deficit of non-majority perspectives both on the pages and behind the scenes in the book world. Yet the publishing industry remains a bleakly apt example of how increased representation does not necessarily confer material benefits. The same PW report that found the publishing industry to be mostly white also found that while women constituted a clear majority of the industry—74 percent of its workforce, to be precise—they continued to suffer a significant gender pay gap, earning only 70 percent of what their male colleagues did. And so it seems unlikely that increased racial diversity alone will be sufficient to ensure fair pay, equal treatment, or the dwindling of the economic barriers (such as unpaid internships and low entry-level salaries) that have long made careers in publishing available primarily to the educated and affluent.

As we move toward 2042—that fabled year in which the US will purportedly achieve the oxymoronic state of being “majority minority”—the division between diversity and racial equity will only grow sharper still. In its most egregious current iteration, “diversity” has been flattened into an entirely apolitical term that has permitted, for example, former New York City police commissioner Ray Kelly to boast about the “diversity” of the NYPD, whose ranks are nearly 50 percent people of color, but which has continued to routinely profile and murder blacks with little evidence of having been tempered at all by its multiracial makeup. The persistence of police violence, gentrification, and other forms of racialized repression in New York (technically already a “majority minority” city) further shows how achieving diversity so often falls bitterly short of reordering existing structures of power, or even generating the empathy that many believe will in turn engender equality.

Just recently, in an incisive overview of The New Republic’s publishing history, Ta-Nehisi Coates speculated that the magazine, which had excerpted the neo-eugenicist text The Bell Curve in the 90s, “might have been helped by having more—or merely any—black people on its staff.” He went on to praise Buzzfeed as an example of a media outlet whose commitment to diverse hiring practices had yielded the thoughtful, progressive journalism that had often eluded The New Republic.

However, I wondered: Was The New Republic racist because its editorial staff was homogenous, or was its editorial staff homogenous because The New Republic was racist? As Coates himself pointed out, a current of white racial hostility had undergirded much of the magazine’s output under the watch of longtime owner and editor Marty Peretz. It’s possible a progressive black staffer could have very well posed a challenge to Peretz’s odious influence, but it somehow feels more plausible to imagine Peretz—who once attributed black poverty to “cultural deficiencies”—hiring the magazine equivalent of CNN’s Don Lemon, should he have ever felt compelled to diversify his staff.

Though the notion that demographic plurality inherently buffs away racist ideologies is seductive, it explains little of how racial exploitation and disenfranchisement have produced our current literary and intellectual culture, which, among other injustices, continues to prioritize white artists and writers and their output.

“For years,” writes Jeff Chang, “good-willed people had believed in a conceit—perhaps it was multiculturalism’s core conceit—that if more people of color, women, and gays were represented, that if they could tell their stories and the stories were heard, then empathy would follow and equity, too.” But, as the evolution of the multicultural movement has uncomfortably shown, demographics in a given context can change significantly while hierarchies stay the same.

]]>http://aaww.org/limits-diversity/feed/0Aubade for Winterhttp://aaww.org/aubade-winter/
http://aaww.org/aubade-winter/#commentsTue, 10 Mar 2015 12:30:42 +0000http://aaww.org/?p=19172I went to see what people are really like / in a thousand human ways.]]>

For Poetry Tuesday we bring you work by Sandra Lim and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. These poems are invitations, unlocked doors. Each poem is a room where we feel intimate and close to the poet’s voice. The poem cracks open to reveal a kind of light, its heart, to confess secrets and love—for “you,” “for something about the world,” for “something awfully beautiful.”

RITE OF SPRING

by Sandra Lim

Dimmed summer. The fortune-teller reads
my palm in the humid dark.

That spring I could not be whole.

Feeling atonal and unconciliatory,
I went to see The Rite of Spring.

I went to see what art in general is about
and what people are really like.

I wanted to watch the shape
of a movement,
the trajectory of a body as it makes

the shapes that it will in a limited ambit,
revolving around an implied center.

The young virgin dances herself to death
to bring forth
the flowering of spring.

Free-verse rhythms,
ritualized, vivid decisions of actions.

I went to see what people are really like
in a thousand human ways.

All these gestures from life, deformed
to suit a more open, imagined music.

She won’t make an affirmation
or a negation of my destiny,

but it’s good for business, the way she eats
through the score of a life and keeps me
hypnotized by the future destination.

I watch the fortune-teller as I watch
an absorbing movie:
I just want to know what happens.

AUBADE

by Sandra Lim

From the last stars to sunrise the world is dark and enduring
and emptiness has its place.

Then, to wake each day to the world’s unwavering
limits, you have to think about passion differently, again

Don’t we forgive everything of a lover
if we are the motive,
if love promises to take us to many places, to even larger themes?

Faithlessness is a heart glancing down
a plumed avenue
in which one is serenaded by myriad, scattering birds.

Thunder in the air begins opening appetites;
everyone is being true to themselves, they think—

And then it is having your right arm sheared off
and the whole world gets to touch you, chime your losses.

I turn to my imagination, but its eyes are still
green, as if from
too much looking on at equatorial gardens.

Still, if I were you I would linger here,
deepen in the rottenness,
learn something about the world, about the desire for safety.

Then, I’d make an instrument from the ruins,
something awfully beautiful.

I would sit down to eat as if I were reading a poem.
I would observe how the night
went into the day with a special grandeur.

It could be like swallowing a sword and growing surprised
by how good it is, how it opens.

And then maybe to sing out with a throat like that—
saying look,
look how the world has touched me.

SELF-PORTRAIT AS NIAGARA FALLS IN WINTER

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

I’ve only frozen over six times. First was in high school
with cornfields on either side. The fever frothed before

I even met you. Another time, birds were on my body.
I have no other explanation for all the snow-stiffened wings

kids would find and tuck into their pockets to thaw
in their mouthy-warm cars. I sometimes catch a whiff

of cinnamon bread baking and the smell hovers before
it falls. I did that too. Hover, I mean. Too cold for a sari,

sorry: I won’t wear one unless I’m at a wedding. And weddings
here offer more brightness than a whole week’s worth of stars.